Data Warehousing on AWS - Tips and Tricks

This is my list of hints and tips for this course. It’s markdown so you can save it, access it or store it anywhere. I might also give you other links that are course specific. I’ll add specific answers to questions I get during the course. I’ll share it with everyone.

Group Exercises

These exercises augment the course material. The instructor will decide when and if these group exercises are conducted.

Lunch time entertainment

Administrivia

We need to jump through some hoops to get access to the labs, notes and my hints and tips. Be consistent with the email address you use for all sites. There are three seperate sites you need to access and one bitly link which is this page:

  • Join or login to https://www.aws.training/ to ensure your training and certifications are captured. No we don’t spam you or sell your details.
  • Access Qwiklab (yes it is spelt INCORRECTLY) ** aws.qwiklabs.com for the labs in this class ** run.qwiklabs.com for outside of the class or to do other labs at your own pace. NOTE: Some are free others require course credits.
  • Access the course notes and slides. You’ll receive two emails. One confirming your attendance at this course and with the following links. The download link seems broken. You can download apps for phones, tablets and laptops. Or use your browser if you don’t want to install anything.
  • www.vitalsource.com look for a signup link and download link. Or just go to https://evantage.gilmoreglobal.com/#/user/signin
  • Once you’ve logged into Vitalsource (aka Bookshelf, Gilmore, eVantage) you can redeem your unique course materials code (in a seperate email) and update your book list. You should see a lab guid and student guide for Architecting on AWS, version 5. . The student guide is the powerpoint decks and notes and the lab guide is the step by step instructions for the labs.
  • Solutions and AWS CloudFormation templates for the labs can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/2HnUkLc

Some Fundamentals

Cool links

Ian’s list of links for weekly review of all stuff AWS. (trying to keep up with the firehose)

http://www.tinyurl.com/awswhatsnew Please help spread the words: AWS What’s New: https://aws.amazon.com/new/ AWS Support What’s New: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/whats-new/ Jeff Barr Blog Post: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-action-links-for-aws-trusted-advisor/ Jeff Barr Tweet: https://twitter.com/jeffbarr/status/558429034712162305 Twitter: https://twitter.com/awscloud/status/558429091561340929 Facebook: http://on.fb.me/1CHt54F Google+: http://bit.ly/1BiVrTt LinkedIn: http://linkd.in/1AVPh9a

https://aws.amazon.com/podcasts/aws-podcast/ and all the faq pages for each product (this is where I start reading)

Best Practice

AWS Answers contains deployable solutions for common big data problems. Great for prototyping and reverse engineering. These solutions also contain best practices in terms of tagging, nomenclature, applying the rule of least privilege and integrating services. https://aws.amazon.com/answers/big-data/

Compute links

  • aws cli wait command will time out after 120 checks. They’re labled as failed checks in the documentation but they aren’t strictly a failure. Whatever the wait command is waiting on never reaches the wait state if it times out. The timeout period can vary so check the documentation for the service and wait state you’re interested in. Here’s EBS https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ec2/wait/snapshot-completed.html
  • Here’s a useful sortable table of EC2 instance types, sizes and specifications. Not your add columns like available for EMR which makes instance selection very simple. https://ec2instances.info/

Streaming links

Athena Links

EMR Links

DynamoDB links

Glue links

Security

Redshift Links

Continue reading articles in my Amazon Web Services series